Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1851 · exile

Hawthorne's 1851 novel, written in the year after The Scarlet Letter and set in a house that still stands in Salem. A wizard hanged on Gallows Hill curses the family that took his land, and two hundred years later his curse is still working its way through an old maid, a returning convict and a daguerreotypist lodging upstairs.

1. 1
   Salem

   The House of the Seven Gables on Turner Street, a real building Hawthorne's cousin lived in - and Colonel Pyncheon, who took the land off Matthew Maule and was found dead in his new hall with blood on his collar.

2. 2
   Boston

   Judge Pyncheon's world of politics and money in the city, which the house exists to feed - and where the deed to the eastern lands that would make the family rich has been missing for a century and a half.